By MARK SVENVOLD Mike Strizki’s house, the house of the future, the revolutionary house that might very well change our lives forever, is an unremarkable two-story, 3,000-square-foot, white colonial-style kit home in front of which, one rainy day last November, were parked no fewer than seven trucks and cars, a pair of Jet Skis, a speedboat on a trailer, several golf carts, a small tractor, a couple of vans and an old dump truck rusting in the middle of the woods, like a major reworking of a Robert Frost poem. There was nothing odd, or futuristic, or exotically “eco” about the house — no solar panels to be seen, no giant arrays of thermopane windows passively drinking up light and heat; yet here, I’d been told, in the Sourland Mountains in New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan, was a house that had the potential — not long from now, not 20 years from now, but maybe within 5 to 10 years — to help turn millions of American homes into fully self-sustaining power plants, each one capable of producing hydrogen to fuel cars as well.

By Maria Surma Manka Mike Strizki’s utility bill is zero, thanks to some creative thinking using renewable energy technologies. By using solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks and an electrolyzer, he has enough electricity even on the cloudiest days. And Strizki isn’t a hermit living in the dark off of snails and rainwater, either. His 3,500 square foot house is located in central New Jersey on 12 acres, with amenities you’d see in any 21st century home, like a hot tub and big screen TV. His renewable energy system even creates hydrogen he uses to power his fuel-cell car. So how does he produce zero emissions?

H2-PV Breeders create new photovoltaic material using energy ultimately acquired from Solar Energy. While the obvious visible source of energy is the Sun and the PV panels, not all of the energy used in the system is electricity from photovoltaics. For example, sunlight is only useful for a few hours each day at peak times of sunlight -- for operations earlier and later, even overnight, stored energy is required. The most obvious supply of stored energy is given in the process name "H2" of H2-PV.

Hydrogen Solar has developed a break-through technology for producing high purity hydrogen at competitive commercial rates. Using well established science and low cost materials, the company's Tandem Cellâ„¢ technology can split water directly into pure hydrogen fuel and oxygen without external power requirements. The Cells are built into arrays which are of modular design such that installations are scalable to applications of any size.